Remember how everyone referred to America as a “melting pot” in school? Well, that’s about to change in UC Berkeley. The school — for some INSANE reason — thinks the term is offensive and administrators want it out of the curriculums. Glenn’s been warning for a long time that universities are turning into reeducation camps that brainwash students to only think certain thoughts, and this may be the craziest example yet. Glenn had the story and reaction Tuesday morning on radio.
Fifty years after the birth of the free speech movement at the University of California, Berkeley, officials across the UC system are encouraging faculty and students to purge mundane, potentially offensive words and phrases from their vocabularies.
Administrators want members of campus to avoid the use of racist and sexist statements, though their notions about what kinds of statements qualify are completely bonkers. “America is a melting pot,” “Why are you so quiet?” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job,” are all phrases that should raise red flags, according to the UC speech police.
Get Glenn's reaction below, and scroll down for a transcript.
Below is a rush transcription, it may contain errors:
Glenn: First you ban words. Now you're banning phrases.
It's not unlikely that the next step is to ban books. I mean, how could you not ban books? If you're saying that the person -- America is the land of opportunity, a book that says that must be banned. One that makes that case.
If you're saying that America is a melting pot, you've got to ban the books that originated that. How could you possibly have a book in the library that explains why affirmative action is racist? That's a racist microaggression by default.
It's not far down the road before books are banned by universities.
PAT: It's interest too because the people -- a lot of the same people who banned words in the past, like the N-word, which has absolutely been banned for white people.
GLENN: Not the president.
STU: It's -- it's the people who banned it that can say it. It's really fascinating to me that that's perfectly acceptable and he used it like you said earlier, without hesitation.
GLENN: With no hesitation.
PAT: He just went right to it. And I don't know how you can do that when you've been preaching all along about racism and offensive words.
GLENN: Because the first thing you have to do is you have to set up -- like Animal Farm. All animals are equal, some are just more equal than others.
PAT: Yeah, that's where we are.
GLENN: You have to set up who is running the show. And who is running the show is definitely not God. God -- all rights do not come from God; they come from the government. And so they will tell you what you can and cannot do. They will make the rules.
You can't expect to understand them. They're arbitrary.
Because they're making them.
STU: Haven't we as a country done a pretty good job at sorting these out ourselves?
GLENN: No, because a lot of places, the most qualified person gets the job.
STU: I know. But this is why this is ridiculous. Like, we have a First Amendment in this country. And you look back at history, we are less than 100 years from a time where a -- a president that is completely celebrated today by the same people who want to make these bans in banning flags and banning words, those same people celebrate Woodrow Wilson, the guy who brought the KKK back. We're less than 100 years from that. We didn't ban people saying the KKK. We didn't end their organization. We didn't stop their publications from being available. They just suck so bad, the United States decided, get away. What a great country.
We don't have to ban these horrible ideas. You know, they get pushed back into the dustbin of history through what we see as a free speech market. It actually works. I mean, you see in Germany where they have -- they've gone and you can't do -- the guy wearing the Nazi armband on the train we were talking about yesterday, where was it? Seattle. That can't happen in Germany. You go to prison for that in Germany. Obviously you can do that. But the organic way to make these things go away for good and to be really tossed into the dustbin of history is to let people come to their own conclusions that those ideas are wrong. They're horribly, horribly wrong. And I think that's -- we've done a pretty good job of that in this country. We've come a long way.
GLENN: Yeah. Okay.
STU: I mean, I'm not going to say melting pot on the air. Oh, no. I did it.
GLENN: Wow. America's land of opportunity, Stu.
STU: Yes, I like it. I know it's unpopular to say, but I like it.
PAT: I suppose you feel the most qualified person should get the job.
STU: Yes. That's why I don't understand the whole Jeffy thing.
GLENN: Gee, Pat, why are you so quiet?
PAT: Are you saying I should assimilate into the dominant culture?
GLENN: I have to tell you something, I know we've joked for a long, long time, about, you know, Glenn always says, oh, yeah, Glenn, you know, he takes anything, and it always ends with a bullet in the head. This ends with a bullet in the head.
PAT: It does. I agree with that. I agree with that.
GLENN: This ends with a bullet in the head because the next step. They started with words. They're now doing phrases because the phrases are ideas. We're not talking about words anymore. We're talking about ideas.
The most qualified gets the job is not a string of words. It's an idea. So you have to squash the idea. If you can't squash the idea, you must put a bullet in somebody's head. What happens? Play Bill Ayers again. Play Bill Ayers again. Listen to this. This is the FBI informant that studied the Weather Underground in the 1970s. This is him when it became unclassified. This is what he said
VOICE: I brought up the subject of what's going to happen after we take over the government? You know, we -- we become responsible then for administrating, you know, 250 million people.
And there was no answers. No one had given any thought to economics. How are you going to clothe and feed these people? The only thing that I could get was that they expected that the Cubans and the north Vietnamese and the Chinese and the Russians would all want to occupy different portions of the United States.
They also believed that their immediate responsibility would be to protect against what they called the counter-revolution. And they felt that this counter-revolution could best be guarded against by creating and establishing reeducation centers in the southwest.
We would take all the people who needed to be reeducated into the new way of thinking and teach them how things were going to be. I asked, well, what is going to happen to those people that we can't reeducate? They're die-hard capitalists. And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated.
GLENN: Okay. Stop. There you go. There you go. They're going to have to set up a reeducation camp. I contend that's the University of California Berkeley. That's a reeducation camp, gang. You're going there. You're sending your kid there, and they're telling them, there are ideas they must not think. Who puts their kid in a college where they say, you must not think those things? I want to go to a college that challenges my children. Pushes their buttons. Make sure they know what they really believe and what they stand for. Say the most outrageous thing to get them to think.
They're telling them, you shall not think. Nobody does that. Nobody does that. Nobody with good intent does that. I don't want my kids going to a church. I won't go to a church that says, you won't think these things. You won't read won't things. You won't talk about these things. No, no, no. Nobody says that to me!
I read what I want. If I want to read something that is -- is challenging to my faith, I will read that. Because I'm smart enough to figure it out.
They're telling your children not to think. That ideas are dangerous. Ideas change the world.
That ideas of merit are dangerous. Merit changes the world. Merit is the reason we have stopped disease. Merit is the reason we feed as many millions of people as we feed because of merit. Somebody did something. Somebody said, I can fix that. And they did.
So what happens? First you have the reeducation camp. There are those that will not go. The reeducation camp teaches you how to think.
They must ban certain thoughts. Once that ban doesn't go far enough, then they have to ban the thoughts and the books that those thoughts are contained in. Those books that further that thought. They must discredit those authors. They must discredit anybody who stands up for that. Who has a different point of view. Shout them down! Shout them down! Beat them in the streets. Call them racists. Call them haters. Do whatever you have to do. But get them to shut up.
If you can't scare them into silence, you beat them into silence.
And if you can't beat them into silence, you just kill a few of them and everybody else shuts up. That's the way it works. That's the way it has worked every time in human history. What, we're unique somehow or another? It doesn't end this way somehow or another? Tell me what makes us different than the Nazis when they banned thoughts. Tell me the difference. When you have comedians who have always gone to the universities -- why? Because they're open-minded. That's where you go and you try new thoughts, new things. You try to it on the youth. These -- the youth today are being taught, close your mind. Shut your mind down. Don't think different things. Think exactly what we tell you. When comedians will no longer go to college campuses because they're sheep. Because they're foolish. Because they're politically correct. You've -- you don't have revolutionaries. You have lemmings. You have useful idiots.
When will our children wake up? When will our college students wake up? They're telling you to ban ideas.
If you would have learned anything in history, you would have known, that is the act of a fascist dictator. I'm called a fascist. I say, read anything. More importantly, read what they tell you not to read.